[sheriff]

A elder friend of mine own's a Presario 5710 (AMD K6-2-450, 14gig hdd, usr modem and a lan card. It was brought to me because they couldnt get on the internet. I started doing some testing 4 days ago. Every time I got a modem installed (win98se os) it would report no dail tone and not connect. I would check the phone line, outside, after disconnecting the house from the phone line, shure enough there would be no dial tone. I would use my 2nd phone line diall the # for the line I used to connect to internet, there would be a busy signal. Used 3 diff New modems, same results. I had the phone company checking everything from my house to the switching center, less than 5000ft away. They changed everything on my line for new equipment. This morning I started by canning the operating system. fdisk'ng formating and loading WINME on it. Loaded the modem just fine, hooked to outside line and it again caused the phone switch to lock up. The phone tech says that the computer is throwing a short on the line which causes the phone companies electronic circuitry to disable the phone line for approx 30mins then re-sets itself. I had to tell the owner that I think the MoBo is the culprit, no matter if I try to use a PCI, ISA or external serial port, the results are the same everytime, locks my phone line. The same modems on a different AMD K6 box hooked to same phone lines, work fine. Any one have any Ideas to help??????